Using Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI) to Teach Qualitative Research Methods

The early 2000s witnessed the beginning of a renaissance in qualitative research methods in the discipline of political science (e.g., Collier and Brady Reference Collier and Brady, 2004; George and Bennett Reference George and Bennett, 2005). This renaissance has included the development of more systematic and analytically explicit approaches to using qualitative evidence for descriptive and causal inference. Unfortunately, however, the teaching of qualitative research methods has not kept pace with their development. In particular, a recent study of the methods curriculum in 25 top political science doctoral programs between 2010 and 2015 found that qualitative methods instruction tends to take a passive rather than an active form. In marked contrast to the teaching of quantitative research methods, students rarely learn qualitative analytic methods by practicing their use on data generated and shared by other researchers (Emmons and Moravcsik Reference Emmons and Moravcsik, 2019, 4). Although not necessarily representative of the broader discipline, these findings suggest an important gap in the instruction of qualitative methods at the graduate level.